Homemade MAME Machine, ROMZ vs. the real deal

[Oobgarm]

The recent trip to Cedar Point has gotten me interested in a few arcade games I'd never played in the arcade before, and rekindled my interest in some forgotten classics.

I've spent quite a bit of time with MAME on the computer here, so I've decided to undertake the project of building my own personal arcade machine and outfitting it with MAME. Rather than exhume an existing machine, I want to build mine from the ground up.

Anyone have experience building their own, or know someone who has? This looks like it will be a fun and challenging project.

[Flack]

Here's a few hundred who have:

http://www.arcadecontrols.com/arcade_examples.php

I had an empty cabinet donated to my project. I've bought a computer, monitor, and now just need to get the ball rolling. So little time, so much gaming to do. Good luck with yours, once I get started on the assembly of mine I'll share some pictures.

Flack

[ddockery]

I'm in the same boat, but probably won't begin making mine until next summer, after my wedding... I figure something like this will fly a lot easier than say, 20 arcade cabinets. I want to BUILD it too, i nothing else to learn something practical.

[leonk]

Yup..

just finished mine.. worked on it for 6 months..

It has a 25" original Arcade monitor, 2 controllers, 6 buttons per person.
Has about 300 Arcade games, 50 SNES games and 50 Genesis games.

It's running and AMD 2400+ CPU with 256MB RAM. It's running with the ArcadeVGA video card and J-PAC connector.

If you wanna do it right, prepare to spend some good $$$.. getting the arcade machine was the CHEAPEST thing for me!

[Flack]

How do you have yours boot up? I was thinking of writing a custom VB app that would allow you to use the joystick and choose which emulator you want to load up. Might be cool to sit on my stool and play some Pitfall or River Raid on that thing ... I hope 720 plays okay on a regular 8-way joystick.

Flack

[buttasuperb]

Real arcade boards > MAME

But enjoy building your machine, should be fun.

[Oobgarm]

How do you have yours boot up? I was thinking of writing a custom VB app that would allow you to use the joystick and choose which emulator you want to load up. Might be cool to sit on my stool and play some Pitfall or River Raid on that thing ... I hope 720 plays okay on a regular 8-way joystick.

Flack

I am still going to boot it up into Windows. That way I can run my NES emu as well. Using a big trackball as a mouse should be fun.

Real arcade boards > MAME

I agree with that statement 100%(not to menetion they look cool), but I can't spend money on decicated cabs. Even though there's only a handful of arcade games I truly enjoyed and want to play on this machine, the cost of buying dedicated cabs would kill me.

I anxiously await the ability to play Street Fighter II on this thing.

[Flack]

Real arcade boards > MAME

But enjoy building your machine, should be fun.

Real cabs certainly are better ... in fact, I love the ones I have already. But MAME cabs have their place too, especially when space and money are an issue. Same with all emulators, really. I prefer the real C64 over WinVice, but when I go out of town for a week for work it's a lot easier to fire up WinVice on my laptop than it is to drag my SX64 and a stack of floppies with me.

Flack

[ragtime_tgs]

[double post]

[ragtime_tgs]

i decided to take a slightly different approach and didnt built a mame cab,but a
jamma compatible mame pc that fits into a cps2 housing and can be plugged in and played on every jamma compatible cab.
it features internal voltage converters and doenst need any additional atx power supply,i cloned the electronics of a snes pad 3 times and connected it to the parallel port to circumvent the limitations of hacked keyboards(only 3 buttons at a time etc) and it has an 8w stereo amp.
im running pure dos with advmenu and advmame wich seems to be the best solution for me.(a bitch to configure,but very low loading time,fast etc)
it doesnt have a harddisk,but a compact flash cart on the ide bus(yep,compact flash carts do understand the ide protocol,look on the sandisk homepage for instructions on how to rewire a cf cart) for increased reliability.
i also implemented a small circuit that disables the video output lines until the gui has loaded to prevent ugly non-synced bios screens
here are some pics:
http://type4.homeip.net/d4s/arcadedriss.htm

[Tom61]

That's pretty cool ragtime_tgs! Very novel. Is it OK if I add you to the examples of arcadecontrols.com?

[Isometric_Bacon]

How do you have yours boot up? I was thinking of writing a custom VB app that would allow you to use the joystick and choose which emulator you want to load up. Might be cool to sit on my stool and play some Pitfall or River Raid on that thing ... I hope 720 plays okay on a regular 8-way joystick.

Flack

One word, MAMEWAH.

Check out www.arcadecontrols.com, you should find a link in the software forums.

I myself am also building a mame cabinet (from scratch, none of this conversion buisness ), and are nearing completion. Once i'm all finished i'll probably upload it to this thread so you guys can have a squiz .

[leonk]

Real arcade boards > MAME

But enjoy building your machine, should be fun.

?!? I tend to disagree...

Here's a couple of observations I have about the whole "MAME" idea..

1) You gotta have a really FAST machine to get the original experience

2) Almost 100% of all bar top arcade machines, are really PCs!!! They boot into MS DOS, load a special CD-ROM driver that has encryption keys to match the CD that's in the drive, load the touch screen driver, and boot the game. Sounds like "MAME" to me! And this is commercial grade stuff!

3) If you MAME right, with real joystick, real buttons, real coin door, real amp, real monitor from an arcade machine, use a non-matrix based key converter, and use a real 15 Khz RGB about PC video card... Well, there is no way *EVER* you'll be able to tell the difference!! Down to the pixel position, color, refresh rate, and speed!

But point #3 costs $$$, needs some really knowledgable work, and many don't want to go that far.. they end up using cheap out to TV ATI video cards, using a PC monitor, or using a regular TV. Heck, in this situation, even the real board would look bad!

Don't knock it till you tried it..

Anyways.. MAME chat belongs at arcadecontrols.com .. not here.

[buttasuperb]

?!? I tend to disagree...

I will say it again.

Arcade PCB's > MAME

You can give all the reasons you want otherwise, but it's the truth.

I don't care if someone wants to play MAME or not, it doesn't matter to me. I think it's pretty cool that people take the time and build their own machines. Has to feel pretty nice to finish a project like that and play some games on a cab.

Anyways, however you go about it, GAME ON.

[leonk]

buttasuperb:

I REALLY want to know the reason behind your way of thinking.. this really interests me a lot. Trust me, I'm not trying to put you down or anything, but empty unrational statements don't make a lot of sense to me.

For example:

I'd be the first to stand up and say that emulating NES on the PC is not the same as having the real thing. The rational reasons behind this being:

1) You miss the feel of the real controller
2) If you wire the controller to your PC, you miss the feeling of the real TV
3) if you use TV out, you miss seeing the actual game cart ART & manual ART
4) You miss the feeling of putting the cart in, and pulling it out and holding it in your hand

The above reasons are why I'm an AVID NES collector, with 600+ carts and 50+ accessories.

On the other hand, I can't think of a SINGLE reason why PCB > MAME!

You don't see the PCB, many times the PCB is a real PC (as with all new PCB's), you don't switch PCB's, MAME boots PCB's the same way, you have full control via MAME TAB key to change same settings as jumpers on PCB..

Heck, I was even the owner of Xmen COTA CPS2 PCB and I really can't tell the difference between the original JAMMA board in my arcade and the MAME version...

Anything else??? Is it the art work on the arcade box that does it for you??

I mean, if you take any arcade machine, pull the JAMMA board out, put in a PC. Have it boot to DOS and start MAME with that game directly and then come into the room, will you EVER be able to tell I switched the JAMMA board with MAME!??

I personally don't think so.

Let us know.

[Arcade Antics]

Anything else??? Is it the art work on the arcade box that does it for you??

That's part of it, certainly.

I mean, if you take any arcade machine, pull the JAMMA board out, put in a PC. Have it boot to DOS and start MAME with that game directly and then come into the room, will you EVER be able to tell I switched the JAMMA board with MAME!??

Definitely. A computer will occasionally bug out. A machine typically won't, but when it does, it will behave differently. You'd also notice the hard drive sounds.

I agree with Butta 100%.

[leonk]

Arcade Antics:

As far as the art work goes, there are many places on the internet that will sell you silkscreen original reproduction of the CP art, side art work and marquee reprints. The quality is going to be identical to the original. So if you're trying to just reproduce one system (e.g. PacMan, or an arcade machine that's close to imposible to find.. you can do it).

As far as the hard drive noise, the noisiest part of an arcade, believe it or not, is the monitor!

Apart from that, arcade machines have fans on their power supplies, and fans on most of their PCB's. As far as HD noise, you can install an HD into your system that is dead quiet (like the one I'm using).

Also, don't forget that games like Area 51 and newer all have hard drives connect to the PCB's.

When it comes to MAME, it all depends how far you want to go, and how much $$$ you got to spend. But if you are dedicated enough, and work on it for a long time, you can tweak it to the point where even during bootup you'll never be able to tell there's a PC in the box!!!

By the time my 25" original Arcade monitor warms up and shows the RGB video, Windows XP is booting.. but I got XP tweaked to the point where you don't even know it's XP.. Heck, you can't even tell it's Windows!!!

1 Button turns on the system.. 1 button turns off the system. No extra buttons on the CP that aren't found on the original arcade machine.

And best of all, you gotta put in quaters to play!

Unless I tell people, they never know it's not "the real thing" or what ever that means today...

I personally get attached to the actual feeling and gameplay. I don't get attached to ROM chips and PCB plastic. I can buy that stuff for pennies at the local electronics shop.

[Kid Ice]

Anything else??? Is it the art work on the arcade box that does it for you??

That's part of it, certainly.

I mean, if you take any arcade machine, pull the JAMMA board out, put in a PC. Have it boot to DOS and start MAME with that game directly and then come into the room, will you EVER be able to tell I switched the JAMMA board with MAME!??

Definitely. A computer will occasionally bug out. A machine typically won't, but when it does, it will behave differently. You'd also notice the hard drive sounds.

I agree with Butta 100%.

You can throw in all the "what-ifs" in the world, you just can't replicate an original arcade game, especially a classic one. Something is lost in the translation.

You could probably do a complete, killer MAME machine for around two thousand bucks. I probably will do that one of these days, but I'm reluctant too. Now if someone said "Here's 10 new classic arcade cabs, give me $2000", I'd hand the money over IN AN INSTANT. And that's only 10 games; you can play 100X that on a MAME cab.

[Flack]

Not everyone has room for 10 cabinets in their house.

I have multiple original cabs, and am working on a MAME one as well. I would like to have 3,000 cabs in my backyard arcade, but due to practicality, I think a MAME machine's the way to go. Feel free not to play it if you ever drop by.

Flack

[leonk]

"Don't knock it till you tried it"..

I've played mame and non-mame'd games ON THE SAME PHYSICAL BOX. And for the life of me can't tell the difference.

saying stuff like "you got stuff lost in the transition" well what stuff!? What transition? Are you aware that the ROM files are PHYSICAL bit-for-bit dumps of the ROM's from the PCB? Are you aware that MAME 100% emulates functional CPUs?

MAME ARCADE does not equal MAME on your computer!!! Playing MAME on a 21" Sony Trinitron computer monitor with a computer keyboard is not even close to the real thing.. it sucks!

So, find someone who did a real MAME conversion, check out the quality, and then come back here and tell us how it sucks.